A few years ago it seemed like good content was enough to get you over the hump of SEO, but today it seems like that story has changed. More and more companies are finding that unique content isn’t cutting it anymore and the ‘content is dead’ mantra is spreading fast.

But is content really the problem? I’m not convinced.

Sitting down and putting pen to paper is just the tip of any content iceberg. We shouldn’t be so quick to damn the entire process when elements like optimisation and marketing play a large role in the success of any content.

So if you’re scratching your head wondering why your infographic isn’t being shared, or why no-one is commenting on your blog post, here are some reasons why your content is failing.

1. Because it’s not that great

If you find that your content is failing it’s probably a good idea to stop and have a think about whether or not your content is actually as great as you’d like to think it is.

When I say great I mean a number of different things;

- Is the content relevant enough to the subject matter?
- Is the title attractive enough, does it draw readers in?
- Does it have enough credibility, or are you just making stuff up? (Readers can tell the different you know!)
- Is it correctly optimised for appropriate keywords? (People often making the mistake of over optimising to the point where it’s obvious)
- Have you triple checked your grammar and spelling? (Rookie mistake)
- If you read your content, would you want to share it out? Would you want other people to read it?

If you’ve read that list through and fumbled over one of two of the points then your content probably isn’t great. By no means is that the definitive list of great content check points, its literally just what sprang to mind, but the fact that I’ve thought of all of those points in about 30 seconds shows just how many more could be thought up if you spent the time to really think about your content.

2. Because it’s not marketed properly

Another reason great content fails is because it’s not marketed to an audience with the right intent. If you’ve written a blog post about optimising your website for SEO then it’s going to do you no good if you push it over a Twitter account whose followers are largely made up of fanatic dog-lovers.

Put a great deal of thought into who you want your audience to be. This can even include content on guest blogs – If you’re going to invest your companies’ time in guest blogging then make sure that it’s for the right kind of blog.

Also make sure your timing is appropriate, especially when it comes to social media. Remember that it’s okay to send a tweet more than once (given an appropriate gap, of course) or share a Facebook link a couple of times a week, not all 10,000 of your followers will see your 9am update.

3. Because you expect too much

Be realistic when it comes to your expectations. If you’re a medium sized business churning out a blog post or two a week the likelihood is your content is never going to hit TechCrunch status.

Remember that unless you really dominate your niche, you’re going to be competing with X number of other companies for keywords and content relevance, because lets be honest, nothing is completely original anymore.

You may look at your content as something crafted from hours of blood, sweat, and tears, but Google doesn’t look at it like that. Google is only reading the book, it doesn’t care who wrote it; so you can’t assume that one article/blog post/infographic will get you on page 1.

Expecting too much and experiencing a psychological fail can be just as much of a detriment to your content strategy as an actual 0 visitors fail can be. Depending on the size of your business 300 organic visitors to a blog post might be enough, 3 Retweets might be enough, even one infographic reshare might be enough. Don’t get sucked into the ‘page views are everything’ mentality because unless your content is for brand awareness, it doesn’t necessarily matter.

Content might not be king any more but that doesn’t mean it’s been booted out of the kingdom altogether. Businesses shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that content marketing is a waste of time and the Venn diagram, courtesy of SEOmoz, shows that even though content marketing is now sharing the limelight with Technical SEO and Social Media, it’s still very much a part of any optimisation strategy.

To really maximise your content marketing, whether it be via blog posts, news items, press releases, or email marketing, there are a few steps you can take to make sure you get off to a good start.

1. What do you want to achieve?

Before you start a content marketing campaign it’s important to firmly establish the point of it. What are you trying to achieve? Promotion of a product? Customer interaction? Brand awareness?

Content marketing isn’t likely to be the sole form of marketing you use so think about how content can aid your current campaign. Also set yourself a deadline, by what date do you want to achieve your goals?

2. Know your audience

Blog posts, news posts or email marketing campaigns are likely to fail unless you can display a coherent theme that relates to your audience. In order to find out which themes will be effective, you first need to know your audience.

Do all the research you can to determine exactly who your audience is. If you have the resources it’s helpful to perhaps send out a survey or a poll so you can get a general idea of the age, sex, demographic, interests etc. of your audience.

There are of course, a few assumptions that can be made when determining your audience. For example, if you’re a web hosting company you can assume that your audience will display more of an interest in blog posts relating to web hosting than they would graphic design.

3. Themes & developing content

Once you’ve established what you want to achieve and the exact audience to which you want to target, you can actually start planning your content.

Start thinking about what themes you want your content to revolve around, what kind of voice (are you writing from a personal perspective?), the kind of tone you want (informative/stern or conversational), and whether you want to aim more towards guides or casual news items. Personally, I find making a list of rough titles I want to write to helps me with developing content so I have a kind of check list of posts I want to write, this also helps me with the planning of my content, which brings me on to my next point.

4. Scheduling

Think about how often to want to publish content. If you’re sending emails, how often are they going out? Perhaps you’re writing an monthly newsletter or a weekly product update. If you’re blogging are you aiming for a daily post? Do you have the time and staff to do this? Always try to be realistic with your schedule or you could become overwhelmed and start producing poor quality content, or missing deadlines altogether.

The tips from now on can be seen as a continual loop. When you first start your content marketing you’ll take an educated guess at what times and dates are best for publishing content. However, once you go through the testing, measuring results, and plan review stages below you’ll probably find that you need to come back round to the scheduling stage and re-evaluate your strategy.

This isn’t a bad thing though so don’t worry if you find yourself back here 3 or 4 times before you start seeing some positive feedback.

5. Testing

As with any kind of online marketing and advertising campaigns it’s important to test different methods of promoting your campaign in order to determine the most effective delivery method.

Testing may seem easy but there are tonnes of variable combinations that you’ll need to explore if you want to really cover all your bases. Don’t just test whether a short blog post works better than a long one, test whether a short blog post works better than a long one at 10am, whether it gets more retweets on Twitter than a long one, or whether it gets you more comments.

Testing and measuring your results (below) go hand in hand so remember that for every variable you test and change, you also need to be recording its effect.

6. Measuring your results

As a company that takes pride in our email marketing campaigns we put a great deal of effort into measuring the success of each campaign. We take into account factors like the number of people in the campaign, the title of the email, the time of day, the length of the email, interaction rates, the relevance of the email to the recipient, and much more.

We can look at all of these things to determine why certain emails failed and what proved to be effective; do 10am emails have a higher interaction rate than 5pm emails? What about Monday compared to Friday? Long emails or Short? These are all factors that can be turned into useful information; market research if you like.

The same principles can be applied to blog posts and news items too; timings, content, audience, relevancy; they’re universal variables that come into play with all kinds of content marketing, and are therefore all variables that can be harnessed and studied.

7. Don’t be afraid to change the plan

Obviously, the point of testing and measuring your results is so you can optimise your content marketing strategy. If you find that your original plan isn’t working, don’t be afraid to change it.

If your content either isn’t working, or starts to drop (in visits, CTR’s, comments etc.) then loop back round to the testing stage and start again. It’s safe to assume that once your figures start dropping, you start to lose the attention of your audience and therefore you start to lose the reason for your content marketing.

See also: A Guide to Successful Email Marketing